David McElroy

I made a few fun images over the weekend of my current cats as Halloween characters. Alex was a vampire. Meg was a spell-casting witch. And Oliver was originally a ghost, since his light gray fur seemed appropriate for that.

But as I tried to get to sleep Sunday night, it suddenly hit me that I needed to make a Halloween short about one of the cats I’ve lost as a ghost. And as the “alpha feline” of all time in my house, Merlin was the obvious choice.

So this is a one-minute short that I enjoyed creating Monday.

I started with original photos of Merlin and then designed scenes in a spooky mansion for him to roam as the home he was reclaiming. OpenAI’s image generator then helped me make reference images of those scenes and I edited them in Photoshop

The scenes were animated — in very rudimentary ways — through a video service called Runway. I wrote the script and had the narration created in ElevenLabs. The music came from Soundstripe, which is the service I use for all my music needs.

The titles were created in Photoshop and then everything was assembled in iMovie on my MacBook. (This was simple enough that Final Cut Pro would have been overkill.)

I had great fun making it, so I hope it will make a few people smile. And if the moon is full for Halloween this week, don’t be surprised to see Merlin back for a visit.

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At some point — about 12 years ago — Amanda and I had exchanged phone numbers. That’s what she told me tonight, but I don’t remember it.

She worked at a restaurant in a part of town where I used to live. I had just bought the house where I live now, so I was about to move. We apparently exchanged numbers — the way people sometimes do when they say they’ll stay in touch — but I never called her.

Until she called me out of the blue Friday evening, I hadn’t thought about her for a very long time. If someone had asked me about her, I would have assumed she had forgotten all about me, too.

But Amanda has been troubled lately. And she said her thoughts kept coming back to a man who used to talk with her about her unhappiness and her dysfunctional family, especially her narcissistic father. I understood a lot about her because I was still coming to grips with my own narcissistic father and my own dysfunctional childhood.

We talked on the phone for a little while and then agreed to meet at a restaurant near my house about 9:30 p.m.

I thought I was meeting her just to be an amateur therapist and caring listener. For almost three hours, that’s what happened. But as we were in the parking lot saying our goodbyes, she said something that made me very uncomfortable.

Amanda said something about me that contradicted everything I believe about myself.

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I’ve discovered that I can’t be free until I stop telling other people why they’re wrong.

By the standards of my culture, that sounds like nonsense. I’ve lived my entire life doing just the opposite of this. I’ve invested a tremendous amount of time and energy and effort in “correcting” other people.

I’ve invested a lot of time in explaining why political coercion is wrong. I’ve invested a tremendous amount of energy explaining why certain people and groups and ideas are evil. I still believe all those things. I haven’t changed my mind about my morals or ethics or philosophical reasoning.

But I’ve slowly realized something that terrified me. The time I spend fighting the things I hate — and the time I spend explaining why certain people or groups are wrong — is the time I keep myself trapped in a prison cell of my own making.

This is a paradox, but it’s changed my life.

The truth is that there is an unending supply of things to complain about in the world — things that deserve criticism and attacks. All sorts of people are wrong about all sorts of things.

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